I'm on an old version of 3dsmax. With autodesk going the route of Adobe, I don't think I'll be moving to the subscription model, and will probably hold out hope that the disgruntled independent artists will bother the blender devs enough to not make a face-grindingly painful UI. Blender has actually come a decent ways UI-wise, but its still got a ways to go. Nonetheless, I've managed to make some modifications to the presets and stuff to provide much more max-like behaviors and interactions, so its possible in a few years I'll be using blender too, but most of my stuff is in max files for now.

JohnBWatson wrote:Very nice models there. Any relation to the other Sapiens faction?

Yeah, they are. The original idea (on semi-secret IRC where a few regdevs go to chat regdev stuff) was "Sapiens who got radiation'd into needing constant life support". I think they've changed a fair bit since then (partly because wolfy's factions always change a bit between first idea and final group, partly because of the inevitable Dalek comparisons)...but they are indeed related in one way or another to the Sapiens. Not necessarily very closely related at this point though.

....Personally I'd love to see that style of station semi-replace the existing ones in vanilla. A cross between this sort of design and the existing Class C prefab would be awesome.

Yep, they are related to the Sapiens! And the solarites as well - they're a branch off of the group of Sapiens that formed the Solarites. Having gotten separated from the main group as they fled Commonwealth space, they ended up settling at the edge of the Frontier, using what they had (mostly freighters full of nuclear material and weapons) in order to build up infrastructure and survive. Over time from radiation exposure and inbreeding (due to their originally limited population and lack of anyone entering the gene pool) and eventually large doses of unliscensed fertility drugs to force their reproduction inspite of decaying genetics, they became more and more twisted and short-lived, forgetting even what a 'pure human' actually is.

In their indoctrinated eyes, they are the pure ones - everyone else is a super-being genetically augmented be superior in every way. And they intend to exterminate all the impure.

And now because of such a long wait (summer months got hot and expensive, and I'm covering a lot more expenses then before, so I layed off using my main development computer)...

Here's a bunch of pictures! (Note that weapons and such are in-progress. I also need to go back and update the solarite weapons still)

These pictures primarily feature 3 new factions: two are enemies (the Enovi and Skrinya) and one is friendly (Valuf)

A Valuf gunship faces off an Ares destroyer

A bunch of Enovi drones attacking a Valuf destroyer

An Enovi station

Some Enovi drones fighting Skrinya heavy gunships and one of their zooanthrope slaves

Enovi drones attacking some Skrinya freighters. The freighters are operated by the non-belligerent lower caste of skrinyan society who formed out of those objecting to the practice of slavery.

One of the skrinya warbird and an upper caste station - by now, you might have noticed their odd feathered appearance. They are avian-form neohumans with the upper caste having 'cloud cities' in a small gas-giant. The upper caste ships are designed to operate in that atmosphere.

A Valuf juggernaught invades Skrinya space and starts shooting things up. Valuf have tough, sturdy energy-resistant ships, largely in response to their Skrinyan and Enovi enemies both using energy weapons. The smaller skrinyan station is used by the lower caste, while the larger one is for the upper caste.

Some Valuf juggernaughts attacking a solarite battleship which seems to be preoccupied with attacking something else.

Some Valuf ships attacking a lone Deimos. A dead Skrinyan zoanthrope heavy raider is in the upper left corner.

All the Valuf ships nicely docked at a placeholder station. That will be swapped out with a proper station graphic.

Skrinyans and their zoanthropes dogfighting with a Valuf gunship, but then a Valuf Juggernaught arrives on the scene...

A fourway fight between a Krethul gunship, a Solarite Destroyer, a Valuf Destroyer, and a group of Enovi drones (including a drone frigate) (The Solarite ship was shooting at me actually, but I'm offscreen)

Beautiful screenshots. As graphics for both this and the main game get better, I'm starting to think that the wreck destruction animation is in need of replacement.

So, the Sapiens are more numerous/powerful here than in the base game? I'd always thought of them as a small faction of people who got left behind economically when one of their great grandparents somewhere down the line couldn't afford genetic engineering treatments for their kid, destroying their economic competitiveness and leading to a downward spiral, with the least successful of each generation permanently falling out of the 'enhanced' gene pool due to assortative mating. The religious overtones always reminded me of gangs in some third world countries, with ideological stuff supposedly going on in the background, but mostly just existing as an excuse to look out for their own in a dangerous world. I assumed they were only relevant militarily because they were willing to make up for their lack of material resources and genetic enhancements with unparalleled ruthlessness.

The sapiens offshoots in the borderlands formed from a large sapiens movement earlier in history during the syrtian war by a sizeable extremist branch, back when the coalitionn was in its infancy.
They intended to use the chaos sown by the syrtian attacks on earth, earth's complete and utter lack of a defensive fleet, and a large number of illicitly obtained thermonuclear military ammunition loaded into a large fleet of civilian ships - many of which were converted into q-ships or massive flying MIRVs - in a partially-thought out surprise attack on earth's centers of government.
They were massing near the Sol gate preparing for the attack, when the CW fleet happened to be passing through on their way to assist in the war against the syrtians. They panicked, thinking that they were found out (when really it was just lucky timing on the CW's part that the sapiens were biding their time to gather as much firepower as they could in that one spot when they just happened to be passing through), a small firefight ensued, and the vast majority of them escaped into the frontier. The precursors to the order got lost partway through the journey, as they were with the largest and slowest bomb freighters, while many more managed to escape past where the infant coalition was forming and settled in a dead end section of the gate network, eventually building up and becoming a significant force to be reckoned with - something that was enabled by just how rich in resources that region is.

Ah, so the less well - equipped Sapiens we see in vanilla are just a branch of a much larger organization. The scale of this mod is definitely becoming apparent - the way even minor factions have capital systems, fully fleshed out sets of ships, and backstories is something to behold.

I was thinking the other day, and looked back at the original solarite ships I had made for the mod that would eventually grow up to become TSB, Transcendence eXtended

I decided to see what I could do with them, and staying as faithful to the original models as possible, i slapped on some materials I had originally made for parts of the valuf ships and made a passable faction out of them, so I decided to include them as a tribute to some of my oldest work for transcendence.

They are a very small faction, the Democratic People's Republic of Denotna, a level 3 system near to the Dalvan system. They're another small-time power competing for territory in the area, and they also posses some smaller weaker capital ships, but they have an important advantage against the Dalvan - they have level 3 thermonuclear torpedos.
Their torpedos are easy for a player (or any small or medium craft) to dodge, as they fly really slowly, but the large Dalvan ships aren't so nimble. The bigger Dalvan ships can take on any of the DPRD's ships one on one, but the DPRD can swarm down the bigger Dalvan ships.

For a player with a fresh ship, the DPRD can be a tough opponent to face - fortunately their ships are all pretty slow. Even their gunship tops out at .20c. Most of their weapons are very short-ranged, except for their slow and easily dodged torpedos, and their lances which are slow to reload.

Here are a swarm of DPRD ships attacking me.

Heres a DPRD station I spawned out in a high level area... which hilariously resuled in a sidemounted fusionfire getting slapped onto a DPRD gunship!

[edit] - and here is a link to those original ships! (the model for that two-pod gunship seems to be lost unfortunately. Recreating it would be trivial, but the faction is pretty well rounded out for a small low level group.)https://forums.kronosaur.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1434

I added in a bunch of stations and updated a few station graphics (Sorry, the valuf still have a placeholder station. Getting them a nice asteroid to use will take a bit more work)

Added a DPRD shipyard and their capital, both pretentiously named as ever!

Added a new metropolis for the alderem

A dalvan shipyard and fortress

One of the giant Domain shipyards that can build A1-class Nodeships. They have a randomized angle, this one is just facing vertical. I have not finished the turrets and docking ports in this picture

A normal Domain shipyard. These are far, far more common, but cannot build nodeships. They too have a randomized facing. I have not finished the turrets and docking ports in this picture.

The Krethul got a new fortress

Yes I shamelessly adapted Solarite ships into stations, but that's... actually intended. Their large ships are meant to be mobile versions of their stations. I might redo the shipyard further, I sort of bluhhed out when I was making it.

The sord have new 'larger station' now as well in addition to their old cache/outpost station.

Rerendered the Ugetis metropolis, and added an uninhabited AI node, as well as a turret (that little sphere up in the top left)

Larger renders of the rean stations, because they were positively tiny before.